MSI's PBO enhanced modes let Ryzen 9000 chips loose, giving you an extra 15% performance.

AMD's Ryzen processors of the 9000 series are now available. The family's power efficiency has been a highlight and they have rightfully taken some of the places on our list. However, there are still those who wish for more performance. Enabling AMD's PBO2 setting can give you a little boost. But MSI engineers have also been hard at work and are releasing new motherboards with what they call PBO Enhanced mode, which takes things a step farther.

MSI's PBO Enhanced has three modes, 1, 2, and 3, with Mode 3 as the most aggressive. MSI claims that the Ryzen 9 9950X gains nearly 10% when Mode 3 is enabled in Cinebench R23's multithreaded test. Not bad at all.

When default settings are used, the 65W Ryzen 7 is the most power-constrained chip of the Zen 5 line. However, when the leash is removed, its multithreaded performance increases by 15%.

MSI did not release results for single threaded workloads or gaming, but because such workloads don't require full power all the time, as a multithreaded workload that is run over a longer period of time does, performance gains will be smaller.

Zen 5 is known for its efficiency, and I love the thermal limit settings from MSI. You can choose from three different settings to limit your chip's maximum temperature to 65,75 or85 degrees Celsius. According to MSI setting a 9950X at 85C will not significantly impact performance and may even increase performance in some cases. When set to 65C, a chip that runs naturally cooler like the Ryzen 5 95600X will lose 1% of its performance.

According to reports, setting a 9950X's temperature limit to 65C will only cost you 5% of its performance while lowering temperatures 30C. These options are great because they give you a choice of coolers or lower noise levels.

MSI has introduced memory timing presets that should be useful to those who want to squeeze a little bit more out of their memory. This could be useful for those who run DDR5-7000+ kit in the 6000MT/s range. Enabling the tighter presets can give you a small latency improvement. This will improve gaming, even if the difference is not huge.

It's great to see that users can now customize Ryzen 9000 series systems to their needs. We can expect that other vendors will follow suit and offer their own PBO enhancements. For now, however, these settings are only available to those who have MSI AM5 motherboards.